About Me: Video gaming started for me aged around two or three, with my Dad’s Atari 2600 and a pretty lackluster port of Nintendo’s Popeye arcade game. That and Activision’s Tennis are pretty much the only games I remember from those early years.

My interest in video games exploded one afternoon in ’90 or ’91 when my Dad brought home a Commodore Amiga 500, with the RAM increased to an incredible 1MB (essentially, putting it on par with the then soon-to-be-released Amiga 500+). During this time, game piracy was as rife as it has ever been and my Dad, my friends, and myself certainly didn’t do anything to thwart this. As such, it was fairly common practice to have several dozen, illegally copied, games added to my collection every month.

For Christmas ’96, my parents bought the family our first PC – a Compaq Presario 4704 – and a stack of PC magazines with coverdisks. Over the next year, I got heavily into Quake, Tomb Raider and Carmageddon. As time continued upgrades, new towers, and games came and went but my love for computer gaming never faltered.

Over the years, I have added over a dozen consoles, hundreds of games, and even a few arcade machines to my collection. When gaming on my own, I prefer to play arcade or arcade-style titles (mainly fighters and shooters), I find that my natural ability to recognize and recall patterns is particularly useful for these genres.